Hip Hop Underground

Anthony Kwame Harrison

The usual full disclosure: Kwame is a friend of mine, and he gave me a copy of the book as a comp for proofreading some of the galleys for him and hashing through some of the ideas with him during the authorship.  So you won’t get an impartial review out of me.  Search the Internet if you want that; I’m sure it has plenty to say on the subject.

What I will say is that the book is at its best when Kwame is just storytelling.  The theoretical stuff is almost all framed in first-person participant-observation ethnography, which is fancy sociologist speak for saying that Kwame rapped as Mad Squirrel in the San Francisco based Forest Fires Collective and then wrote about it.  So, among all of the general and specific postulations about race and class and gender in The Scene are a lot of stories: stories about battles between white and black emcees at house parties, stories about Filipino youth finding a national identity through hip-hop, stories about what happens when a woman tries to participate in a male-dominated open mic.  Like the best underground hip-hop itself, it’s the art of storytelling that makes the message shine.

And at least for me, it is the storytelling that draws me to some of my favorite hip-hop.  Love or hate Slick Rick, but you can’t deny that he spins a good yarn.  Even for acts as popular as Public Enemy, it’s the songs like Black Steel In The Hour of Chaos that people remember.  El-P’s Stepfather Factory is by far the most memorable cut from Fantastic Damage.  And even in the genre of gangster rap, touchstone songs like Ice-T’s 6 in the Mornin’ and N.W.A.’s Fuck Tha Police are built around narratives.  There’s just a lot more to that vein of rapping than there is to some fool shouting rhymed couplets about bitches and ice.

It’s probably not far off the mark to say that we, as a species, are wired for storytelling.  I’m sure that a hundred anthropologists have written a book on that very subject.  Storytelling seems to be a foundation of culture.  Would it be possible to have anything that we could call a “culture” that didn’t include some type of common narrative?  I’m not sure.  When we say the word “culture”, it’s one of the first things that comes to mind.  When we imagine our stereotype of “primitive peoples”, we imagine them sitting around the communal fire, the elders telling stories.  Stories about the creation of the world, stories about the origin of humanity, stories about right and wrong and the consequences of each.  There’s something fundamentally human about participating in that.

Hip-hop, as a culture, is no exception.  It has its creation myths — poor urban kids stealing power from the streetlights to run turntables, switching back and forth between records, making beat breaks for people to dance.  It has its pantheon of primal gods — DJ Red Alert, The Sugar Hill Gang, MC Busy Bee, Kool Herc, etc.  Like every culture, it has its charlatans who try to claim direct lineage from those gods.  And it has its modern-day chroniclers, people like Kwame, who retell (and relive) the old stories and create new ones to keep the culture alive.  Hip Hop Underground is a contribution to that storytelling tradition.